


ascend // dissolve

by satyrgod



Category: Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-30 02:08:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17819774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/satyrgod/pseuds/satyrgod
Summary: Worried about Joshua as a heat wave strikes Shibuya, Neku decides to go and check up on him. He gets more than he bargained for as he's thrust into what appears to be a vision of Joshua's memories...





	ascend // dissolve

**Author's Note:**

> WELCOME TO JOSHUA KIRYU'S MIND PALACE.

It was practically routine to check up on Joshua like this. Bad weather always had some kind of effect on him, and isn’t it only human to worry? Neku knows he shouldn’t give Josh the time of day, but it seems he just can’t help himself.

He isn’t too worried today. All that’s happening is a heat wave, even if it is a particularly nasty one. He isn’t even sure if this would affect Joshua, but the fact that he had ignored Neku’s texts was enough reason to go and yell at him anyway.

The usual quick knock to the wall around Joshua’s door stops short when Neku realizes his hand is hitting the _actual_ wall, no barriers whatsoever. Filled with alarm, he he flings the door open, and he feels himself get light-headed at the scene before him.

Of course, Neku knew Joshua could change his room to suit his tastes, so the grand ballroom it appeared to be wasn’t too shocking. What _was_ was the sheer amount of people who had gathered. They were everywhere, and Neku couldn’t seem to spy Joshua anywhere among the crowd.

Although he felt comically underdressed, wearing a tank top and shorts amidst the sea of evening gowns and suits, all in attendance seemed not to care at all. There was a nagging feeling that this wasn’t acceptance, though. Everyone was merely passing over his existence. It was as if he wasn’t in the room at all.

Not wanting to interrupt _whatever_ was happening, Neku turned to leave, only to find that the door had disappeared. After feeling around for the wall for a few minutes, he realizes there is no way out, because of course there isn’t. When has dealing with Josh _ever_ been easy?

He doesn't bother to suppress the bitter sigh that escapes him, and decides to push through the throngs of people, bent on discovering Joshua and finding his way home. Upon entering the crowd, Neku notes not a single person in the room had eyes to see him with anyway. Not that such a thing made a difference, as even shoving them out of his way couldn’t make them recognize his presence. They continued along with their conversations as if nothing had happened at all. What the hell is this?

At the edge of the room, Neku finds himself at a staircase. He climbs up to the landing, and moves to survey the crowd to see if he can spot Joshua.

He almost falls backwards when he sees Joshua standing right at the foot of the staircase, wearing a white suit Neku’s never seen before, looking at him like a deer caught in headlights. He looks _weird_ , though. His eyes don’t have any pupils in them, they’re completely blank white.

They stare at each other in shocked silence for a second, and the moment Neku opens his mouth to question him is the moment Joshua turns and runs down an adjacent hallway.

“Hey, wait!”

Neku starts after him immediately, and it’s not hard to catch up to him at all, Joshua’s no athlete. He catches the other by the arm, and feels it go limp in his grip.

“You aren’t supposed to be here.” It’s uttered in a voice so small Neku’s surprised it’s coming from Joshua at all. He tugs softly at Neku’s grip, and Neku releases him.

“What _is_ all this, Joshua?” Neku asks, and Joshua turns around, giving a sad little shake of his head.

“Use your head, Neku. What does it look like?”

Those _eyes_ of his keep Neku from his usual frustration of dealing with the other, all he can feel is more and more unnerved by the second.

“I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like, Josh. It _looks_ confusing and weird and-- What’s wrong with your eyes?”

“What are you talking about, Neku?” Joshua asks with the most innocent head tilt, a frighteningly genuine sense of innocence, and that scares Neku more than anything else. The creeping sense that _this isn’t the real Joshua_ has finally hit him. But what the hell _is_ he, then? He knows his name and everything!

“I--” Neku starts, and he takes a few steps back, as the other continues to stare into him with those blank eyes. “Who _are_ you?”

And “Joshua” blinks at him, then laughs, and it’s so _familiar._

“I’m Yoshiya.” He says, and his tone is so genuinely pleasant Neku can’t help but find it entirely foreign from Joshua’s mouth. HIs hand is twisting a curl around his finger just like Joshua always does-- If this is some kind of imposter, they know _damn_ well what they’re doing. “And this is a party of Mother’s.” Mother? “Or, well. A reflection of one. If I’d disappeared like this at a real one, she’d have my head.” He giggles here, again, and the pieces start to click together in Neku’s head. Even if he’s not 100% on what’s going on, he knows he’s been sucked into some more of Joshua’s weird Composer bullshit.

“... Uh huh.” Neku says finally, still casting the other a wary glance. “Yoshiya, then. So this is like… what, your memories?”

“You’re getting closer.” Says _Yoshiya,_ and it completely lacks the condescension he expects from him. From _Josh._ “But you’re not quite to the point. Where you are…” And a hand comes to languidly point at his temple. “Is here. Or more accurately…” And it then moves to rest over his heart. “You’re here.”

Neku stares at him, and the other sighs, allowing his hand to drop.

“And you’re not _supposed_ to be here at all.” He smiles, here, and there’s a hint of something sinister in it. “It’s not exactly the safest place to be, you know?”

“I’d leave if I could, Josh. The door vanished, what am I supposed to do?” The other blinks at him, as if what Neku said made no sense at all. A flicker of unease crosses over his features, before returning to the previous pleasant, neutral state.

“Then… Maybe you _are_ supposed to be here.” He takes Neku’s hand, here, and Neku lets him, though his body tenses up. “Let me show you something, Neku. I’d like to hear your thoughts.” He opens a door right next to them, one Neku swore hadn’t existed until that very moment. It’s dark, and Yoshiya flicking on the lightswitch doesn’t seem to do much.

It’s very dimly lit, and covered in dust. What he can make out is the shape of a piano, a bench, and a table fitted with some dead flowers in the corner. Yoshiya is silent, moving across the room like a ghost to lean against the piano. It seemed he wasn’t going to say anything himself, but there’s something he wants Neku to say, clearly.

So Neku looks around the room, and the first thing of interest he finds, aside from the dust that clouds around as he walks, is a picture frame, with 3 people featured in it.

None of them have faces, Neku notes. It’s similar to the disturbing visuals he saw at the party outside. Even with his face blocked out, though, Neku can recognize Joshua in the middle. The other people in the photo are a young woman who could only be Joshua’s mother, and an older man on the other side.

“These your parents?” Neku asks, and suddenly Yoshiya is right beside him. He can’t help but jump a little, and Yoshiya is polite enough to stifle his laughter at it.

“Good work, Neku. That’s Mother and Father. Do you think I resemble them?” Neku rolls his eyes as Yoshiya giggles at his own joke, putting the picture frame down.

“Why are the faces all messed up?”

Yoshiya smiles serenely at him, hands coming to clasp behind his back.

“Why do you think?”

Neku looks at him for a second, and elects not to answer, instead moving across the room to the piano. His heart stops when he looks at the bench.

 _A gun._ A painfully familiar gun, one he’d found himself looking down the barrel of more than once. Numbly, he moves towards it, keenly aware of Joshua once again sticking to his side.

“You should pick it up.” Yoshiya whispers, a strange note of delight _in his voice, and Neku does, with trembling fingers._

The single missing bullet in the chamber makes him feel sick to his stomach.

“What the hell.” He says, voice coming out evenly even as he feels tears come to his eyes. “Joshua, what the _hell._ Is this the one you used on me? _Why are you showing me th--_ ”

“No, Neku. That bullet isn’t yours.” The words stop him short, and he turns to look at the other, whose face is impassive, blank, unreadable. Those eyes are still staring right through him. He feels more seen than he ever has before, ever has with the _real_ Joshua.

“Then whose?”

“Think about it.” A sad sort of smile spreads across Yoshiya’s face, and Neku doesn’t want to think about it. The implication is obvious, he knows, and he can’t deal with learning about what Joshua’s deal really is, right now. Not when he can feel his legs trembling, not when all he can think about is how _he stared down the very same gun Joshua used to-_

A hand claps over his eyes, and it’s _cold._

“Obscuring one’s eyes is obscuring one’s identity.” Comes a cool voice, a tone more recognizably _Joshua_ than the one before. “Use your head, Neku. Why doesn’t anyone have eyes? Why are the faces not visible? Why are my eyes the way that they are? Think about it.”

Neku can’t. And he opens his mouth to tell Yoshiya that, when suddenly the hand is taken off his eyes, and they aren’t in that dusty room anymore. It’s the throne room. The scene of their final duel plays through his head, and he nearly drops the gun in his hands. Yoshiya’s hands come to steady his, placing Neku’s hands around the trigger.

“You’re here for a reason.” He says, and there’s unshakable conviction in his tone. “I think I understand now.”

“Do you?” Neku says, eyes burning. “ _Enlighten me,_ then!”

“I trust you.” It’s said in a whisper, and Yoshiya’s hands fall from the gun. “That’s why, I…” His eyebrows are knitting, as if he’s trying to figure this out as he says it. Slowly, purple irises fade into where blankness once was, and Joshua steps back from Neku as quickly as if he’d been burned. “You--”

And the illusion is broken. The room disappears, the gun disappears, and Neku falls to his knees in Joshua’s dark, gray little bedroom, the other continuing to move back, hand coming to cover the lower half of his face.

“What do you think you’re _doing?_ ” Joshua hisses, and stumbles in his steps, not taking his eyes off of Neku. “You-- What are you _here_ for?”

Neku can’t _breathe,_ let alone speak. The other stares at him as he catches his breath, wiping at his eyes. “I came to _check_ on you, asshole. I was _worried_ about you, and…” He’s interrupted by a sharp intake of breath, a hand coming to clutch at his chest. “I ended up in some _fucked up_ place, with some _fucked up_ version of you, and the _gun_ \--” He doesn’t finish his story, and he knows this isn’t answering Joshua’s questions at all, the other continuing to stare at him from across the room, uncharacteristically silent.

“... Sorry.” Joshua says, finally, and Neku’s head snaps up, but Joshua’s face is obscured. At some point, he’d conjured himself a chair, which he was now sitting on with his head in his hands. “I… I must have let my guard down. These sorts of days exhaust me, so...” A shuddering sigh leaves him, and Neku wonders if crying too. His voice sounds even, but… “Someone I…” And there’s a hesitant pause here, he handles the next word as if merely _saying_ it is painful. “ _trust_ might be able to see into a very unsightly part of myself.” His head comes out of his hands, eyes dry, but they look more dead than Neku’s ever seen them. “Leave me alone next time. There's nothing in there you should be dealing with.”

It’s a surprise he’s still speaking with Neku at all. Any moment, he expects to be whisked back in his own bedroom, and for Joshua to pretend like this never happened… But he doesn’t.

“... I won’t ask what you saw.” Josh continues, and his composure seems a lot more forced than usual. “But I don’t want to talk about it. Is that fair?”

Neku sits there for a second, drawing even breaths in an attempt to return to some shred of normalcy. Honestly, he’s never seen Joshua this upset about something. Leaving like this was nothing seems like it would leave them at the same stalemate they’re always at, so…

“Have you ever thought that maybe _talking_ about it would help?” He expects to be met with some icy remark after this, but Joshua says nothing, presumably genuinely considering the statement.

“It’s affairs of the past,” he says primly, “and I won’t be dealing with it anymore. That’s all there is to it.” Despite how firmly Joshua is trying to close the lid on this, there’s an edge to him that is almost _begging_ someone to pry. To _care._

Neku just wishes he wasn’t feeling so lousy himself, so he could handle this properly.

“Listen,” He says finally, shakily. “I’m not gonna force you to say anything, and I’m not gonna sit here and try to preach to you either. All I’m gonna say is, I’m your _friend_ , Josh, and you can _tell me_ if there’s something that bothers you. It doesn’t matter how old it is, alright? The past can suck just as much as the present.” Joshua doesn’t respond at all, and Neku recalls that he’s aware of every little detail about his own life. “... Most of the time it’s even worse. Keeping it all locked up isn’t gonna do you any good.” Especially if it bothers him enough he’s got a whole….. _whatever that was_ built around it.

A silence sets over the room, and a heavy sigh from Joshua finally breaks it, and when Neku looks up he has his hand clenched next to his head as if he’s suffering a migraine.

“What, Neku, do you want to hear my whole life story?” Joshua’s snapping at him, which isn’t entirely surprising. Honestly, it’s a lot easier to handle than if Joshua had started being genuine with him from the start, and it’s a little easier to sober up his own emotions under this harshness… Somehow.

“I _just said_ I’m not going to force you.” He sighs too, a great deal less exasperated than Joshua’s. “Look, all I’m saying is, something in you is more bothered about it than you like to pretend you are.” Joshua stiffens at that, and Neku wonders exactly how much of what he just saw Joshua knows about himself. “... You said you weren’t gonna ask me about it. You don’t know what I saw yourself, do you?”

“It doesn’t _matter._ ” Joshua’s eyes flash with warning, and Neku knows he’s a hair’s breadth from getting kicked out. “What _does_ matter is that it’s done with now, and you won’t have to deal with it again. It’s _over._ ”

“You’re not saying no.” Neku says, intent on needling Joshua as much as possible before he’s forced out. “I’m only bothering with this because I _care_ about you, Josh. If you would just _talk_ to me--”

The air shifts, and, predictably, Neku finds himself in his bedroom, in his desk chair, right again back at square one. Every time he makes progress with Joshua, everytime it seems like he’s on the cusp of _actually_ learning something about him… He’s chased away, the door slamming firmly shut behind him. He buries his face in his hands, a low groan escaping him.

It’s impossibly frustrating, and he knows from experience Joshua is going to completely ignore him for a few weeks, then pop up like nothing happened in the first place. The worst part is, he’s hardly even mad as much as he is worried. It’s no secret Joshua is deeply, deeply troubled, but Neku can’t get that sad smile he had seen on Joshua’s face out of his mind.

The other one, Yoshiya, had said that he trusted him with such earnestness, yet Joshua himself spit out the word like it was poisonous. Whatever happened to him, whatever he had dealt with… It hasn’t stopped plaguing Joshua even now. Neku doubts it ever will, with how determined he seems to be to keep it under such lock and key he can’t even access it _himself._

Exhaling through his nose, he takes his hands off of his face, leaning back in his desk chair as he tries to figure out what he’s even supposed to do with himself now. The day is hardly even over, so it’s not as if he can go to sleep to escape from all this. Walking across the room, he picks up his old headphones, and feels comfort wash over him in waves when he fits them around his ears. He knows it’s not good for him to be indulging in a bad habit like this, but sometimes shutting out the world is all he can think to do.

Turning the volume to max, he goes to lay down on his bed, close his eyes, and lose his thoughts to the music. It’s nice to forget that you exist, as long as you can bring yourself back from it.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm genuinely not even sure how much this makes sense. if only joshua would give us some actual answers...! but if he had any plans to, i guess neku never would have seen this. i _think_ its all pretty obvious, but i live in my mind palace too, so who knows. the dead flowers in the piano room, by the way, do have significance! while neku certainly can't identify them, uncultured as he is, they're poppies. white and yellow ones. they mean rejoice and success. haha.
> 
> maybe one day i'll write a fic where joshua can actually express his emotions in any way shape or form but its not gonna be anytime soon


End file.
